


Garden View

by scioscribe



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, Extra Treat, Friendship, Gen, Post-Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), Rocket is One of Thanos's Assassins and Gamora is Groot's BFF
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-09
Updated: 2018-09-09
Packaged: 2019-07-10 02:44:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15940169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: “So, how’d you two meet?” Rocket said.  “Chlorophyll convention?”





	Garden View

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Artemis1000](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Artemis1000/gifts).



“So, how’d you two meet?” Rocket said.  “Chlorophyll convention?”

Quill—and who asked Quill?—looked over at him with the disgusted pity of somebody who thought he would have come up with something funnier.  Then he went back to fucking around with that mask of his.  There was a lot to fuck around with on the _Milano_ , if you had a thing for shitty, half-cracked weaponry and pirated tech that was always running two or three updates behind, and Rocket did.  With Thanos, the worst times had always been when there was nothing to fix, no way to keep his hands busy, nowhere to look but at the people around him.  Brothers and sisters.  Who wanted brothers and sisters?  They were all just meat waiting for the sausage grinder.

Rocket hadn’t lived so long in dear old dad’s company by being friendly.  He’d have lost his mind.

But here he was, with new people, and nobody was saying anything about how they had to be a family, nobody was making him be here at all.  If he wanted to, he could take off at the next stop and never see these assholes again.

Nothing but wide open options.  Nothing but people who weren’t doomed.

So… what did you do, in a situation like that?  Old rules out the window.  If he wanted to, he could get to know his friends.  Maybe he wanted to.

“You get it?” Rocket said.  “Because he’s a tree and you’re—”

“I get it,” Gamora said.  She was balancing Groot’s pot on her thigh, like she had a baby there, and she was jostling her knee a little: rocking a tree to sleep.  “No.  It was not a chlorophyll convention.”

“You mean a botany convention, anyway,” Drax said to Rocket, all helpful.  “My wife was a botanist.”

The dead wife thing killed the conversation for a minute.

Rocket hadn’t ever been to Drax’s world, but he’d been to a few others.  He had a knack for large-scale explosives, large-scale _thorough_ explosive, no-chance-you’d-identify-the-bodies explosives, and it had gotten him kind of a reputation as a dick, if he wanted to downplay it.  A reputation as a heartless monster was more like it, as an animal who didn’t understand the finer emotions like wanting a stiff for the funeral.  Really he’d just wanted it to make it painless, make it so they never even knew what hit them, make it so Thanos didn’t have a pile of bodies to gloat over all sadly.  He hadn’t been thinking about the survivors at all.  He’d figured they were like him, they’d take of themselves.  But he’d never had anybody he’d cared about losing.

Anyway, Thanos had taken him off universe clean-up duty after a while.  Made him into a different kind of weapon—single-point hits, infiltrations where it was an asset to be smaller than most people.

That had been better.  He’d been on his own more.

“Look,” Quill said, “if this whole science conversation goes any further, I’m going to start feeling bad about only having, like, a third-grade education plus _Yondu_ , so hey, Gamora, how’d you meet Groot?”

“Photosynthesis club,” Gamora said, not twitching so much as a muscle in a smile.

“Oh my God,” Quill said.  “I give up.”

Drax patted him on the shoulder.  “It isn’t very hard to explain.”  Then they all had to listen to Drax go through how photosynthesis worked, which probably took a year off Rocket’s life if dying of boredom really did turn out to be a thing.  At least it cheered Drax up again.  He kicked back; sharpened one of his short-swords and hummed.

Rocket was going to let the whole thing go—who was he to not get why somebody might not want to go digging around in their past?—but then Gamora answered, answered without making one of them ask again.  She was rubbing one of little Groot’s leaves between her fingers, lightly enough to not risk accidentally plucking it off.  No need to give the twig a shitty haircut.  He’d have enough problems getting brought up by the Guardians of the fricking Galaxy.

“We broke out of prison together.  I’d won a fight a little too thoroughly for that place’s comfort and Groot had bashed a couple of people’s heads together for trying to underpay on a bounty.  But this was on Amatta—Amatta’s very civilized.  No punitive justice, just rehabilitation.”

It would take a hell of a lot longer to rehabilitate Rocket than it would take to punish him.  Hard pass.

“They didn’t get many off-world offenders,” Gamora said.  “Groot and I stood out.  I didn’t want to be the center of an exhibit any more than I wanted to talk about my feelings while sitting in a circle.”  Never mind that they were sitting in a circle now.  “Groot liked the art therapy, though.  He did good watercolors.  I was more of a sculptor myself.”

Rocket could see that.  She had strong hands.

“I wanted to get out of there.”  She touched one of the scars near her temple.  “I’d had enough of people being in my head.  And then the art therapy got dropped to once a week.  Budget cuts.”

“It’s always budget cuts,” Drax said sagely.

“So that finished off Groot being interested.  We made it out.  Easiest prison break of his life—we just went up and said we wanted to go and they said that we could.”  She curved her hand around the clay pot and suddenly Rocket wondered if she’d made it herself.  “Turns out for lower-level crimes, you can always get out of prison on Amatta.  You just have to ask.  And sometimes they tell you they don’t think you should go.  That’s what makes it a breakout: they said we’d be better off staying, but we left.  Maybe before I went, I learned I didn’t want to be alone anymore.”

“So you became partners,” Quill said.

“So we became partners.”

“How old were you?” Rocket said, because he’d been called a child his whole life, before them, he’d been Thanos’s boy, and he knew what it sounded like when you thought back to being young without ever having been a kid, without ever having been all watercolor-innocent.

Gamora didn’t look surprised that he’d guessed.  “Fourteen.”

“What did you sculpt?”  Leave it to Quill to ask that kind of question and actually look like he cared about the answer: his eyes were serious for once, intent.

“Bowls.  Dishes.  Flowers.”  She swept her thumb against the pebbled clay of Groot’s pot, and Rocket thought that about confirmed his suspicion about where that thing had come from.  “Lots of flowers.  Groot was the first time I ever saw any.”

“That’s not a bad first,” Rocket said.  “All things considered.”  Hell, it wouldn’t be a bad last, even, but he didn’t know that he wanted to think like that.  Not now that he finally had something to live for.


End file.
